Conservative commentator Ann Coulter recently credited hate website VDARE.com editor Peter Brimelow with inspiring the attacks on progressive immigration policy within her new book, 'Adios, America.' In fact, many of the ideas presented in the book appear to be closely modeled after ideas presented by white nationalist and anti-immigrant extremist movements in America.

Oregonians for Immigration Reform (OFIR) is an anti-immigrant, nativist organization that has used local media campaigns with other nativist organizations to fight against legislation in Oregon aimed at supporting immigrants. After successfully attacking licenses for undocumented immigrants, OFIR has launched a new campaign to lobby against a bill that would allow undocumented immigrant graduates from Oregon high schools to receive state funded, need-based college scholarships.

People are looking for leadership--those who stand for something and offer a vision for how to take America forward and keep our nation economically competitive. One of the most immediate ways to revitalize our economy is by passing immigration reform.

I chose to come to America and become a citizen because America was--and remains--the most free and entrepreneurial nation in the world. Our history is defined by people whose character and culture have been shaped by ambition, imagination and hard work, bound together by a dream of a better life.

Later that day, Fox invited Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) to respond to Murdoch's op-ed on The Real Story with Gretchen Carlson. During the show, host Carlson moderated a debate between Stein and immigration attorney Francisco Hernandez where Stein accused the Obama administration of "openly sabotaging" immigration law enforcement because Obama doesn't believe anyone ought to go home.

Over the past three months, Fox has amplified the voices of two anti-immigrant guests, Michael Cutler and Dennis Michael Lynch, hosting them at least 13 times to rail against immigration reform and bash immigrants. Cutler, a former immigration officer, has an extensive history of associating with anti-immigrant, nativist organizations. Lynch is a documentary filmmaker whose expertise on immigration seems to stem only from directing two anti-immigrant films that have been heavily promoted by nativist organizations.

The Black American Leadership Alliance (BALA), an anti-immigrant coalition that has ties to nativist hate groups, is hosting a rally in Washington, D.C., on July 15 with the purported mission to "preserve economic opportunity for American workers" by opposing immigration reform. Here is what the media should know about the group and its effort.

The Washington Examiner relied on a dishonest chart from a nativist organization to push the myth that undocumented immigrants who are convicted of certain crimes in the United States would receive a reprieve from repercussions under immigration reform legislation.

The Washington Examinerused a chart from the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) -- a Southern Poverty Law Center-labeled nativist hate group -- which details the criminal repercussions for those seeking legal status, as well as for U.S. citizens and legal immigrants. According to the chart, undocumented immigrants who commit certain crimes would face less dire consequences than U.S. citizens and legal immigrants who commit the same offense:

Furthermore, the following chart published June 21 by the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a nonprofit organization that opposes liberalization of immigration law, compares the consequences for an array of crimes and discovered that while illegal immigrants might be exonerated and legalized, U.S. citizens and legal immigrants face years of incarceration or temporary expulsion from the country.

Both FAIR and the Examiner are misleading about the repercussions of crimes committed by undocumented immigrants. The chart makes it seem as if there are no criminal repercussions for undocumented immigrants who commit these crimes under the Senate's immigration reform legislation, but undocumented immigrants who are arrested for a crime must go through the criminal justice system just like U.S. citizens, and if convicted, can serve jail time or pay fines.

Radio host Laura Ingraham hosted the executive director of Progressives for Immigration Reform (PFIR), Leah Durant, to push the debunked myth that the immigration reform bill would hurt the African-American unemployment rate, despite studies which show the opposite is true.

On the June 4 edition of The Laura Ingraham Show, Ingraham introduced Durant as a "progressive" voice on the issue and not a "right-wing bomb thrower." Durant explained that her group is against the immigration bill because it would have "devastating consequences" on low-skilled workers, specifically in the black community:

However, Durant's organization is a pretty far cry from a "progressive" group. Progressives for Immigration Reform was set up as part of the John Tanton network of anti-immigrant nativists after they failed to take over the Sierra Club, which the Southern Poverty Law Center called "greenwashing" -- a tactic used by nativist groups to appeal to environmentalists in order to mainstream their nativist viewpoints in a more respectable venue. In another attempt at "greenwashing" right-wing groups established Progressives for Immigration Reform "as a purported group of 'liberals' " in the latest attempt "by nativist forces to appear as something they are not."

Imagine 2050, an organization that promotes a multiracial democracy, highlighted some of PFIR's links to the anti-immigrant movement, including the fact that nativist Roy Beck, head of NumbersUSA, helped recruit the executive director of PFIR. In addition, several of the group's members, including Durant, have close ties to Tanton's other groups such as the Federation for American Immigration Reform and the Center for Immigration Studies -- groups labeled nativist by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

In fact, as the Anti-Defamation League pointed out, at a recent conference run by PFIR, several notable anti-immigrant nativists were in attendance, including VDARE's Peter Brimelow, Wayne Lutton, editor of The Social Contract, an anti-immigrant pro-white publication, and K.C. McAlpin, president of U.S., Inc. who once defended banning Muslim immigrants as similar to banning communists or Nazis in the past.

While the group's ties are problematic enough, the claim that immigration would hurt African-Americans' job prospects is also false and has been called a "pernicious myth" by Daniel Griswold of the Cato Institute. Several comprehensive studies have shown that there is no evidence to support the claim. In fact, wages for native-born Americans tend to increase as a result of immigration -- including one estimate which found that due to immigration native-born African-American workers saw a wage increase of .4 percent from 1994 to 2007.

A co-author of the Heritage Foundation's new immigration report, which right-wing media have hyped despite even conservative criticism about its methodology, has long promoted inflammatory theories about the relationship between race and IQ in Hispanic immigrants, an unsurprising fact given his ties to extremist anti-immigrant organizations.

Dylan Matthews of The Washington Post's Wonkblog reported that Jason Richwine, a co-author of the Heritage report, asserts in his 2009 doctoral dissertation titled "IQ and Immigration Policy" that "there are deep-set differentials in intelligence between races." Matthews wrote [emphasis added]:

While it's clear he thinks it is partly due to genetics -- "the totality of the evidence suggests a genetic component to group differences in IQ" -- he argues the most important thing is that the differences in group IQs are persistent, for whatever reason. He writes, "No one knows whether Hispanics will ever reach IQ parity with whites, but the prediction that new Hispanic immigrants will have low-IQ children and grandchildren is difficult to argue against."

Matthews also included Richwine's dissertation abstract, which forwards the idea that the U.S. should not only select its immigrant pool based on IQ, but that immigrants and their future generations are not apt to obtain his desired level of intelligence [emphasis added]:

The statistical construct known as IQ can reliably estimate general mental ability, or intelligence. The average IQ of immigrants in the United States is substantially lower than that of the white native population, and the difference is likely to persist over several generations. The consequences are a lack of socioeconomic assimilation among low-IQ immigrant groups, more underclass behavior, less social trust, and an increase in the proportion of unskilled workers in the American labor market. Selecting high-IQ immigrants would ameliorate these problems in the U.S., while at the same time benefiting smart potential immigrants who lack educational access in their home countries.

His dissertation, however, was not the first time Richwine promoted these offensive claims. In July 2008, while Richwine was a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, he said in a panel discussion of the book The New Case Against Immigration, broadcast on C-SPAN, that "races differ in all sorts of ways, and probably the most important way is in IQ":

The argument that immigrants themselves are no different from the ones that came 100 years ago I think is, is quite wrong, and I think that the major difference here is ethnicity -- or race, if you will. I think that race is important for two main reasons. One is that human beings as a species are a naturally tribal group of people. We have inside, outside, groups. We have families, for one example, where, you know, family comes first in virtually every society. And we tend to be very attuned to even small, trivial differences between groups. I don't mean to suggest I think this is a good thing, I wish we could be more universalist, but the reality is that we're not going to be that way, and we shouldn't be basing policy on that either.

The second reason I think race is important is that there are real differences between groups, not just trivial ones that we happen to notice more than we should. Races differ in all sorts of ways, and probably the most important way is in IQ. Decades of psychometric testing has indicated that at least in America, you have Jews with the highest average IQ, usually followed by East Asians, and then you have non-Jewish whites, Hispanics, and then blacks. These are real differences. They're not going to go away tomorrow, and for that reason, we have to address them in our immigration discussions and our debates.

Richwine's anti-immigrant language is reminiscent of that used by the Pioneer Fund, which the Southern Poverty Law Center designates as a hate group that "funds studies of race and intelligence, as well as eugenics, the 'science' of breeding superior human beings that was discredited by various Nazi atrocities." The Pioneer Fund supports the notoriously anti-immigrant and fellow SPLC hate-group Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), founded by nativistJohn Tanton who publishes The Social Contract Press. Richwine spoke at a 2010 event for The Social Contract Press on the "myth of immigrant crime," and, according to the group, argued that "immigrant and illegal alien crime is higher than crime committed by other demographic groups." After joining the Heritage Foundation's Domestic Policy Studies Department in January 2012, Richwine spoke at a Social Contract writing workshop last September about the "connection between culture and immigration" as part of a weekend event hosted by anti-immigrant and white nationalist organizations.

UPDATE: The Heritage Foundation issued a statement to BuzzFeed about Richwine's 2009 dissertation:

"This is not a work product of The Heritage Foundation. Its findings in no way reflect the positions of The Heritage Foundation," Heritage VP of Communications Mike Gonzalez told BuzzFeed in a statement. "Nor do the findings affect the conclusions of our study on the cost of amnesty to the U.S. taxpayer."

Fox News trumpeted the false claim that immigrants who receive provisional status under the immigration reform proposal would get a "tax amnesty" because the bill does not mandate they pay back taxes. In fact, the bill requires that immigrants -- at least three quarters of who already pay payroll taxes -- pay a tax liability before they can qualify for provisional legal status and ensure they pay taxes before they can renew their legal status.

In a FoxNews.com op-ed, Dan Stein, president of the anti-immigration Federation for American Immigration Reform, accused the bipartisan group of senators behind the bill of giving a "tax amnesty" to undocumented immigrants because the bill does not contain language addressing "back taxes" and does not explicitly explain how taxes will be assessed. He wrote that "taxes assessed" are different from "taxes owed" and there is no proof that the proposal would require immigrants to pay anything:

While this sounds good at first blush, "taxes assessed" is not the same as "taxes owed." A tax assessment occurs when the IRS officially records that a person owes money because an individual files a tax return, or the IRS audits an individual - whether or not he has filed a return - and records how much the person owes.

The bill requires aliens to only pay taxes that the IRS has assessed at the time they apply for ["registered provisional immigrant"] RPI status.

If the IRS had no knowledge that the individual had been working here, there would obviously be no tax liability assessed and the alien has nothing to satisfy for the purpose of getting RPI status.

This claim has also received considerable attention from other nativist anti-immigrant groups.

In fact, immigrants who apply for provisional legal status would have to pay taxes. The bill states that immigrants may not receive provisional status until any federal tax liability is satisfied in accordance with regulations to be established by the Secretary of the Treasury. This gives the IRS the discretion to decide how a tax liability will be administered to immigrants seeking the legal status. If an immigrant is granted legal status they would still be required to pay taxes during that period as well.

The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) will hold its annual "Hold Their Feet To The Fire" event on April 17 and 18 in an effort to derail immigration reform and stop the passage of a recently-introduced comprehensive immigration reform bill.

The event -- which will host more than 60 talk radio hosts -- will allow the hosts to broadcast live and urge listeners to push lawmakers to oppose immigration reform.

Last year's event played host to many anti-immigrant radio commentators, including several who have announced that they will attend again this year. These hosts have used their platforms to attack immigrants for bringing diseases to America, committing a disproportionate amount of crime, and illegally voting in U.S. elections, and one host even called for the hanging of undocumented immigrants who commit crimes in the U.S. and sending their bodies back to their home countries:

Lars Larson

Called undocumented immigrants "illegal aliens, or as we call them, undocumented Democrats"

As the Senate's bipartisan "Gang of Eight" moves closer to releasing an immigration reform bill, Dan Stein, president of the anti-immigrant hate group Federation for American Immigration Reform, lays out in an op-ed for Politico the "five compelling reasons why Republicans should walk away" from the legislation. Each one of Stein's "compelling reasons" is wildly misleading, unsubstantiated, or flat-out wrong.

Let's run them down, one by one.

"Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy will not even allow hearings on a bill."

The hearing is in part the result of talks with the bipartisan Gang of Eight working on the soon-to-be unveiled legislation -- including Marco Rubio, who pushed for a slower committee process.

"Democrats will not agree to border security and other enforcement requirements as a prerequisite to amnesty."

According to Stein, Gang of Eight member Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) "demands that legalization take place before border security or other enforcement provisions are in place." Not true! According to the Associated Press, the Gang of Eight arrived at a compromise wherein immigrants "living here illegally could begin to get green cards in 10 years but only if a new southern border security plan is in place, employers have adopted mandatory electronic verification of their workers' legal status and a new electronic exit system is operating at airports and seaports." Schumer is reportedly working on convincing House Democrats to support the compromise, arguing that it is "not an impediment to citizenship but rather works alongside citizenship."

A Fox News "fact" on the supposed costs of illegal immigration to U.S. taxpayers was lifted from a study by the anti-immigrant hate group Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) that has been debunked as flawed.

During a segment on Fox News' America's Newsroom discussing the new immigration reform plan soon to be released by a bi-partisan group in the Senate, Fox displayed a "Fox Facts" graphic as host Martha MacCallum interviewed Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC):

This so-called fact is based on research from the anti-immigrant hate group FAIR. In 2010, FAIR released a study titled, "The Fiscal Burden of Illegal Immigration on United States Taxpayers," which found "the annual costs of illegal immigration at the federal, state and local level to be about $113 billion." At the time the study was released, FoxNews.com defended both FAIR and the study.

Mainstream media outlets should be aware of damaging economic attacks leveled by anti-immigrant groups in an attempt to derail comprehensive immigration reform. In reality, research indicates that comprehensive immigration reform would improve the U.S. economy, create jobs and boost American wages. Moreover, new findings show that immigrants are less likely to rely on public benefits than native-born Americans.

Fox News continues to peddle anti-immigrant myths, such as undocumented immigrants are a drain on the nation's economy, even as Republican leaders recognize the economic benefits of comprehensive immigration reform.

On March 18, the Republican National Committee released a report diagnosing the Republican Party's failures during the 2012 election cycle and offered recommendations to ensure future victories. The report argued for passing comprehensive immigration reform as one way to improve its image among Hispanics, saying:

[A]mong the steps Republicans take in the Hispanic community and beyond, we must embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform. If we do not, our Party's appeal will continue to shrink to its core constituencies only. We also believe that comprehensive immigration reform is consistent with Republican economic policies that promote job growth and opportunity for all.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) echoed that message, emphasizing in a speech today that immigration reform would help the economy. Paul stated, "somewhere along the line Republicans have failed to understand and articulate that immigrants are an asset to America, not a liability." He went on to stress the point that immigrants are synonymous with hard work, adding: "Whether we are discussing hard work, respect for life or the quest for freedom, immigrants bring with them the same values that previous generations of immigrants did."

But the economic message that Fox News is projecting is one that pits immigrants against American citizens and promotes the myth that immigrants have a detrimental effect on the American economy and society. On the March 19 edition of America's Newsroom, host Martha MacCallum brought on Bob Dane, spokesman for Southern Poverty Law Center-labeled hate group the Federation for American Immigration Reform, to criticize Paul and advance these nativist arguments.

First, the myth that immigrants would displace Americans and steal their jobs has been proven time and time again to be false. Second, Dane's assertion that "most illegal aliens are heavily government dependent" is a clear falsehood. Even other anti-immigrant groups such FAIR's sister organization, the Center for Immigration Studies, have said that "preconceived notions about the fiscal impact of illegal households turn out to be inaccurate."

During a report on diminished Republican opposition to granting in-state tuition for undocumented students, Fox News included the view of a spokesperson for the nativist group, Oregonians for Immigration Reform, to argue against the measure and accuse Republicans of "pandering" for Latino votes. Fox News has long engaged in promoting extreme voices to attack in-state tuition for undocumented students.

Discussing proposals in Oregon and Colorado that would grant certain undocumented students in those states in-state tuition, Fox News' America's Newsroom contrasted approving comments from Oregon state Republican Rep. Mark Johnson with comments from Jim Ludwick, a co-founder and former president of Oregonians for Immigration Reform.

Host Bill Hemmer introduced Ludwick's comments by saying, "Not everyone, I'd imagine, is happy about this shift." Ludwick was identified on-air simply as being with "Oregonians for Immigration Reform."

On December 7, President-elect Donald Trump named Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt as his pick to head the Environmental Protection Agency. Media should take note of Pruitt’s climate science denial, his deep ties to the energy industries he will be charged with regulating, and his long record of opposition to EPA efforts to reduce air and water pollution and combat climate change.

President-elect Donald Trump has picked -- or considered -- nearly a dozen people who have worked in right-wing media, including talk radio, right-wing news sites, Fox News, and conservative newspapers, to fill his administration. And Trump himself made weekly guest appearances on Fox for a number of years while his vice president used to host a conservative talk radio show.